At the age of twenty-six Donald Trump had sealed his first multi-million-dollar deal. It was a sweet thing for a young man who had been his father’s full-time student ever since graduation from Wharton. Every morning he and his father drove from Jamaica Estates to Fred Trump’s modest office in Beach Haven, one of the large housing developments the older man had built near Coney Island in the early 1950s. Inside a nondescript, three-story brick building on Avenue Z, the headquarters of the Trump family empire still looked like the dentist’s office it had once been, with a linoleum floor, shag carpet, and chest-high partitions between cubicles.

This is the last of three profiles of the Trump patriarchs, adapted from the author's bestseller,​The Trumps: Three Builders and a President, courtesy of Simon & Schuster.

Nearly two decades after Friedrich Trump came to America and a year before his first son, Fred, was born, another boy landed at New York Harbor. He was fifteen, a year younger than Friedrich had been upon his arrival. Like Friedrich, he had traveled alone and left behind his family, his homeland, and his obligation to enter into his country’s military service. And he, too, did not intend to return. His name was Abraham Eli Kazan, and the country he left was Russia. In the coming decades, he, like Fred Trump, would become a real estate developer in New York, building apartments in a city with a desperate need for housing. In the late 1950s the two men each sought to build on the same stretch of Coney Island, a long and bitter struggle that eventually entangled the highest levels of city government. But it was more than a battle between two well-connected businessmen. Trump and Kazan were leaders in two separate movements battling for effective control of the way the city would grow — and because New York City was a bellwether for the rest of the nation, the way that cities all over the country would grow. Ultimately, on this patch of Coney Island, not far from the famous amusement rides, Fred Trump helped carve America's urban future.

This is the second of three posts on the Trump patriarchs, adapted from the author's bestseller,​The Trumps: Three Builders and a President, courtesy of Simon & Schuster.

In 1973, thirty-three-year-old Dawn Harris addressed the graduating class of Manhattan Community College as its valedictorian. In her speech, Harris thanked “the brothers and sisters at CCNY” who had shut down the flagship campus of the City University of New York (CUNY) in 1969 to demand, among other things, immediate open enrollment across the entire system. She also thanked “those who tried to discourage me” because it spurred her “to make sure that they didn’t count over-thirty, underprepared women with children out.” “I think I did it,” she told her classmates. “I know we did.”

Reviewed by ​Jacqueline BrandonCritics of neoliberalism have well established that disasters, be they economic, ecological, or political, create space for opportunistic restructuring. In post-Allende Chile as in post-Katrina New Orleans, free market ideologues, business interests, and neoconservative political regimes seized the chance to dismantle robust public services and unions, making the death of liberal civil society in the name of corporate oligarchy parading as bootstrap individualism. In mid-1970s New York City, deepening municipal debt and a waning commitment to the liberal politics established by the New Deal and Great Society coalesced in what has gone down in history as the narrowly avoided fiscal collapse of the city. This is the story Kim Phillips-Fein tells in Fear City: New York’s Fiscal Crisis and the Rise of Austerity Politics. Here, sandwiched between the sixties’ welfare state expansion and the eighties’ triumph of Reaganism, Phillips-Fein uncovers the complicated process by which once-liberal politicians and policymakers embraced a form of governance hollowed of public services and friendlier than ever to business leaders and the financial industry.

The New York Young Lords and the Struggle for LiberationBy Darrel Wanzer-SerranoTemple University Press (2016)

Reviewed by Lauren LeftyThe Young Lords have been enjoying their own nuevo despertar in the last few years, as a number of the city’s cultural institutions from El Museo del Barrio to the Bronx Museum hosted exhibits on the late sixties radical Puerto Rican organization. Darrel Wanzer-Serrano’s The New York Young Lords and the Struggle for Liberation is a welcome addition to this reawakening as the first book-length treatment of the East Coast branch of the party, which also had bases in Newark and Philadelphia in addition to its founding chapter in Chicago. The New York Lords only existed for a brief moment from 1969 to 1976, as a “revolutionary nationalist, antiracist, anti-sexist group who advanced a complex political program featuring support for the liberation of all Puerto Ricans (on the island and in the United States), the broader liberation of all Third World people, equality for women, U.S. demilitarization, leftist political education, redistributive justice, and other programs [that] fit into their ecumenical ideology" (5). Yet as Wanzer-Serrano notes, quoting Raymond Williams, they nonetheless provide “resources of hope” for today’s activists and anyone interested in the history and theory of radical social movements. While this book was published before the political upheavals of 2016, it seems all the more relevant for the current moment.

New York City in the 1980s and ‘90s was home to a squatting movement unlike any other in the United States. Drawing on their diverse radical and progressive roots, squatters claimed and occupied city-owned abandoned building with a winning combination: a Yippie sense of drama and fun, punk rock aggression and subcultural grit, and urban homesteaders’ earnest appeals to American values of self-sufficiency and initiative. When faced with eviction they learned how to build barricades and booby traps and drum up riots from their European counterparts, and each attempt to evict Lower East Side squatters from the late ‘80s on brought newly escalated police and squatter tactics. By the mid-1990s, the police were using tanks and helicopters and the squatters were burning cars in the streets.

Battle for Bed-Stuy:The Long War on Poverty in New York CityBy Michael WoodsworthHarvard University Press (2016)​424 pg.

Reviewed by Nick Juravich

As a local Brooklyn blogger in the heyday of local Brooklyn blogs, the politics of place were my stock and trade. Writing on the border of Crown Heights – or was it Prospect Heights? – at the bleeding edge of gentrification from 2008-2013, I covered fights over everything from the names of restaurants to the placement of bike racks. These struggles always served as proxies for a larger set of questions about who wielded the power to define and shape urban spaces. In one particularly memorable episode, a realtor’s idle speculation about the possibility of selling the neighborhood as “ProCro” – quoted in the fourth paragraph of an online Wall Street Journal article – prompted local outcry so fierce that our State Assemblyman at the time, Hakeem Jeffries, introduced legislation in Albany to outlaw the practice of real-estate rebranding. As law, the bill was a dead letter, but as politics, it was dead-on: as Jeffries explained, rebranding was not just part of the process of raising rents and home prices, but served to erase the presence, impact, and needs of existing residents. “Neighborhoods have a history, culture and character that should not be tossed overboard whenever a Realtor decides it would be easier to market under another name,” Jeffries told the New York Times. ​

Folk City:New York and the American Folk Music RevivalBy Stephen Petrus and Ronald D. CohenOxford University Press, 320 pp. (150 photographs) $39.95

​Reviewed by Christine Kelly

Peter Yarrow, of the legendary folk trio Peter, Paul and Mary, sentimentally reflects on the urban roots of American folk music and its capacity to inspire social change in the foreword to this new book. According to Yarrow: “Greenwich Village was, in many ways, the epicenter of the 1960s cultural revolution in America. Remarkable breakthroughs were made... but none more so than in folk music. Folk songs reached people’s hearts, inspiring them to challenge the established societal norms and break with antiquity.” While scholars have long acknowledged folk music as the unofficial soundtrack to much of the nation’s mid-twentieth century social transformation, comparatively few have fully explored the unique conditions in and around New York City which offered an ideal breeding ground for the rise of the American folk music revival -– a unique movement that fused reinvented folk cultural forms with commercial gain and progressive politics.

By Jason SokolHillary Clinton is not the first woman to attempt to shatter the highest glass ceiling. Perhaps her ascent will establish for some of her forerunners a more prominent place in American political history. Ellen Fitzpatrick’s recent book, The Highest Glass Ceiling, focuses on three such forerunners: Victoria Woodhull, Margaret Chase Smith, and Shirley Chisholm. Chisholm ran for president in 1972, not only a pioneering female candidate, but also the first African American to mount a full-fledged national campaign for the presidency.​